>>I was inspired by Carl Sagen's "Contract". In the book, top computers were set to working out the value of Pi to the highest degree of accuracy. Towards the end, the decimals all started to be 1s and 0s, untill their display on the VDU became a circle of 0s in a sea of 1s (or vice versa).
>
>I can spot a dozen flaws here:
>- there's no highest degree of accuracy.

I meant the "highest degree possible given computer power" e.g. 3.142 is more accurate than 3.14.
>The decimals go ad infinitum

>- hence, there can not be any end, only an end of the computer work, i.e. when they fill their disks with calculated digits (and intermediate results - megabyte long numbers that need to be multiplied, divided and added)

When I said "towards the end" I meant the end of the computer's run, or at some point thousands and thousands of dec places along the line.

This business wasn't in the film, btw.

>- any graphics emerging on a VDU depend very much on the horizontal resolution. Change it by one digit (or pixel) and your image gets skewed; change it sufficiently and you get nothing recognizable.

I agree. Although it is nearly 2 decades since I read the book - and that's how I remember it. I thought the same thing then, and as I wrote it just now. I just like the palimpset idea of a "divine" geometric design inside a number.

This business wasn't in the film, btw.

>- why would anything have a structure that resembles a graphic representation of a circle in ASCII graphic?
>- why would decimals show that? Ahy would a decimal representation be so significant? Any base has equal rights - it could be anything, binary, ternary... hexadecimal, base 64, base 299. Any pattern which appears in one representation would probably exist only in that representation and its derivatives (i.e. something looking nice in base 10 may look equally nice in base 100, just half as narrow)

W - E - V!

>
>OK, I'm a bit short of a dozen, but that's only in decimal. In ternary , 12(3)=5(10).

Yadda-yadda-yadda :-)

BTW, another cool concept in the book, that wasn't in the film: The main protagonist is a scientist, empirical woman, and she's arguing a point of scientific fact against this religious guy's faith stance. They're in a museum, and he gets her to stand in the the same plane as a huge pendulum, and brings the weight up to within a few inches of her face and lets it go. On its return she flinches out of the way. He berrates her for denying the scientist's knowledge that the pendulum can't get to her, as it can only reach slightly lower than the start. She retorts with something like "Yes but that was millions of years of instinct battling with a few thousand years of intellect". I liked that.